Ecology and Citizenship in the Chars of Assam: The Human, Nature and Governance Interface

The paper takes the field location in the chars (riverine islands) in the northeast Indian state of Assam, and understands people’s everyday negotiations with river erosion, climate-induced displacement and construction of a ‘doubtful’ identity. The chars are transient landscapes that render residency an impermanent phenomenon. With irregular and unpredictable inundation, disappearance and appearance of land, land ownership in the regions is fraught with ambiguity. While populations get displaced as a result of the inundation of land, there are no visible and pronounced rehabilitation policy initiatives. Concurrently, citizenship in India is largely determined by sedentary residence. Hence, the legality of residence of the displaced (to a new destination) comes to be questioned by the state and a vigilant civil society, and entails doubt and suspicion in the everyday. This often culminates to label them as the illegal foreigners or ‘Bangladeshis’. The paper examines the interface between human, nature and governance that makes residence and citizenship as contested discourses. The National Registrar of Citizens (NRC) that aimed to document ‘authentic’ citizens in Assam, is argued critically for its exclusion of several sections of the riverine communities. These communities traverse the question of citizenship, which is tied to land rights and indigeneity. The instability of the land mass in the char areas implies the impermanent nature of the land itself. This translates to make residence and/or citizenship impermanent. The paper, therefore, explores how the fluidity of the landscape and the impermanence of the habitat make belonging, in the chars, a transient phenomenon.